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I'm not sure if scenes ever "die"; they just change. Sometimes we agree with that change and sometimes we don't, but I DO know that what kills a scene more certainly than anything else is if there IS no audience. People have been saying that hip hop has been dying for years now. I don't think it's going anywhere.

People still do! And I don't think it's our place to say whether a popular artist is compromising at all. Maybe Skrillex makes the music he does because that's the sound he really likes. It just so happens that there are a whole lot of other people that really like it too. I'm not saying that this is the case 100% of the time, but I like to think that artists are sincere most of the time, and it's the systems around the artists (music distributors, internet hype tunnels, etc.) that give us the impression of "insincerity."

I understand how annoying this gets! For people like us it's kind of hard to imagine living as though music isn't one of the more important things in our lives but honestly, other people have more important things to care about than whether tech-house is ACTUALLY tech-house or not. And even if it's a REALLY obvious difference, I don't think it's worth it to care unduly about their knowledge of lack thereof, because in the end, their fondness for a certain sound/genre/artist is still the same as ours. There's no such thing as liking a "real" anything anymore, because what "real" dubstep/hip-hop/EDM/alt-rock is doesn't exist anymore, and it hasn't for some time. Instead of getting hung up on whether their enjoyment is genuine or not, I would prefer to celebrate their enjoyment of a genre and guide them toward other, deeper cuts that they might enjoy just as much as we do. Labels are overrated, anyway.

a tip for future releases: you don't get to choose which criticism is "constructive" or not. all criticism is constructive -- even the lack of response is constructive criticism. it may not be nice, but it's not our responsibility to pay attention to you, and whining about people not commenting or giving "cc" isn't going to help your case any.

an example: I looked up the response to my first full-length posted on this site two years ago. I had worked on it plenty and got art done by KeFF (which is honestly better than the music part of the album) and was all excited and posted it on here. the response I got was a whopping one comment by Wizwars, who had already heard me play and was just showing his support. now, to me, this doesn't mean that the community is narrow-minded and shallow -- it means that I didn't make anything special. so I focused my time and energy into making my next release way better.

it's YOUR art. you don't need validation from us to write music, and if you do, you should probably stop writing music.

P.S. that second release of mine had a total of zero comments! but I was proud of it so I didn't care.

god he loves that thing doesn't he?

ok, I'll bite -- my first performance as space town savior was an open mic.

ok, I'm biting again -- my first real gig was at a bar I had never heard of before and I was SUPER stiff (as in, didn't move while playing) during the whole thing. that's where I met my bro4lyfe mike bleeds and we nerded out about lsdj and chiptune and eventually admitted that we had cyber-stalked the other before the show! he's told me multiple times that he was super stoked to have at least one more guy in San Diego doing chiptune.

you can find the youtube video somewhere but you probably shouldn't because it's awful

I've never been into short releases because they don't feel substantial enough. I'm kind of a maximalist music listener and I want to get lost in albums because they're too long. I LIKE the challenge of having to set aside time to listen to a new full-length, and a lot of it is because albums that are longer are usually more interesting sonically to me. There's something really special about hearing an artist/band's sound develop over the course of an hour or so and coming to the end of it. A lot of my most memorable musical experiences have involved me at 2 in the morning having just finished listening to an entire album with nothing to distract me.

Which sucks, because my current favorite thing to listen to at the moment is dance music, and apparently no one in dance music believes in the album format anymore (mixes are the new albums -- I have too much to say about this so I'll just leave it at that).

That's also why I like to release full-lengths that are at least 10 songs in length. I want to make music for the kind of person that would stay up too late listening to music in a half-asleep haze because they think it's fun to listen to an hour of something uninterrupted and feel good afterward. I really like hearing long, progressive tracks that do the same thing over and over until you've just about internalized the sound, at which point the track will introduce something new.

I do feel like there's a lack of big, sprawling releases that manage to stay interesting over the course of the whole album, but that's just because it's really HARD to do that kind of thing. I don't feel like I've come even remotely close to doing that yet, but I like throwing big releases out there because it's what I grew up with.

sorry it took me so long to get back to you guys!

danimal--thanks a ton! I realized after I uploaded it that I never actually told anyone that they had to click. that's a remnant of the fact that this game was SUPPOSED to be an iOS game but I couldn't optimize it under the current engine and didn't want to port it (I don't know objective c D:)! although another part of me likes the fact that some people might just sit there and listen to the ambiance for a bit...it sets the tone, imo

sketchman--the cursor was a last minute addition when I realized that no one would know where their mouse was! again, it was supposed to be an iOS game so I kind of hastily rearranged a couple things for the website.

as far as the ending goes -- I kind of like the ambiguity! although you're right -- the city SHOULD be flattened, and I'll work on that for the next iteration...it's just that editing building sprites is so tedious and boring and I just wanted to release it already!

everyone else: thanks! this is my first game ever and I've been working on it for a while (i didn't know how to program 5 months ago (I still kind of don't)) so it's great to see that people are receptive and even "get it"!

A big part of why I don't really care for these streams are the fact that a LOT of the activity on the Facebook events/Youtube videos seem to be the people that are playing, about to play, or have played the event already. My girlfriend was actually commenting on the phenomenon and she said something really insightful -- there doesn't seem to be any room for people to simply be fans of the music, especially when it comes to these streaming shows. And that kind of thing matters when you're trying to present this stuff to people outside the "scene"; if all anyone sees are jpegs of the performers that have been MSpainted on, these livestreams start to become insular to the point where it's alienating to other people. Instead of discovering new music and feeling like I'm participating in a community, it ends up feeling like I stumbled in on a big inside joke

As far as the streams themselves go, I've found that they're most successful when they act as portals to events, rather than become the events themselves. The stream has always been a convenience for those who wanted to see/hear an event but didn't have the means to attend. The only way I can see a stream becoming an event is if there's some element of an interactive nature, because if I wanted to listen to x artist's music while I browsed the web then I'd just pull up iTunes.

If you want to make these things better, you have to study the recent successes of the actual streaming format, not try to emulate things that already exist in a better form (i.e. concerts). So two examples that I'd take a REALLY close look at are the e-sports/fighting game streaming scenes (example: http://crosscounter.tv/ or anything day9 related) and turntable.fm.

The first example demonstrates how well you can use streams as portals to bigger events; the most popular streams are always tournament matches between really good fighting game players. The second example shows how adding an interactive element to what is essentially a chatroom with a DJ can make things really interesting and fun for everyone. In our case it could be implemented with livestreams of real shows and/or making it less of a "festival" and more of a hangout session or workshop.

My ideal case is some crazy networked game that can only be played when someone's performing; the performer acts as an agent in the game with some crazy abilities (boss character) and the stream participants have to work together to beat the performer! That would be AMAZING and if anyone has the technical chops to implement this kind of thing let me get in on it as a designer

EDIT:

It's not really that people are shitting on those that enjoy it; it's more of a request that we do better. A critique of something demonstrates way more respect for that thing than coddling its deficiencies.